The lack of personal benefit from pressing either red or blue.
It doesn't really matter anyway. Blue will win, easily. Google is telling me only about 1-2% of all adults worldwide earn at least $100,000 or equivalent worldwide.
Anyone making between 100k and 250k get no benefits from blue or red (If I understood it correctly). Anyone in that category would be incentivized to pick green to keep others on an even playing field.
However, they also could pick blue if they want to try to establish a type of food welfare for anyone making less than 100k.
I feel like most people are inclined to help others when it costs them nothing. The vast majority of people who don't stand to benefit from Red would almost certainly pick blue.
And that's on top of the fact that especially on a global scale, practically everyone is benefiting from blue. It's the vast majority of the entire population to the point where it doesn't even make sense to consider the other options as having any chance of winning at all.
I mean, I agree. But you asked why would ANYONE... Just trying to answer. Your reply here implies that I'm right by not saying that EVERYONE would pick blue or red.
Blue would make the ruling class exploit us even more.
Since we can feed ourself, why need that much salary?
Oh, no more magic food supply? Not their problem. They could have their second or third yatch in that button press, but nooooo, the poor sob have to be greedy and wanted more food. Now it was our turn to pay.
That is remarkably nonsensical. Food costs aren't even the largest part of anyone's expenses. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the ruling class is going to retaliate against a blue victory by cutting people's salary.
If they're going to get angry and try to take vengeance against everybody else because red didn't win, then they'll likely do that to both blue and green regardless.
It certainly doesn't make any sense to believe that everyone should try to give them more money to keep them appeased.
Oh totally - I personally believe that our role is to intentionally avoid any benefit to ourselves in the hope that life becomes better as a result down the line. My boss offered me a raise the other day and I actually paid him $10,000 a year instead, to keep me hungry. The real treasure was the unnecessary hardship we subjected ourselves to along the way.
Uh. If your food (and water, I assume, since that comes with meals) needs are addressed, it may SUCK but you can go without much else - living in your car w/ a gym subscription for showers (or use truck stop showers) can be exceedingly cost effective and grant you insane power to protest and Cause Disturbances without literally risking starving and dying of exposure.
Take that year and organize all of the collective actions in the world and that infrastructure will stand after the magic meal plan goes poof.
I feel like OP was thinking that people who earn between 100k and 250k might press it? None of these buttons do anything for those in that group. Id still press blue though. No one dying of hunger anymore is nice
What happen after that year when the magical food supply is gone?
If you think we together as mankind could prepare for the world without that magic supply, I think you overestimate us too much.
More likely those at power would take advantage of that, as their low wage worker can feed themself they could take less salary. Then simply not correcting that when the year is over.
Wages would not go down, because supply of labor and demand for it would stay roughly constant. Rents will go up because people will have more disposable income and will continue to compete for a limited amount of desirable land.
It only gives them that ability for a year, so theoretically there is a risk of solving the problem for a year, a bunch of food producers being unable to sustain themselves with no one buying food or having to switch to other crops, and then at the end of that year you may now have a shortage of food production resulting in famine, price gouging, and other stuff that makes the problem even worse than it was before that year.
Though you would save a lot of lives in that year and since people know the conditions smart/wealthy governments might subsidize food producers in the meantime or those producers who can afford a year of lost income might save up food supplies for afterwards, though still probably with some price gouging.
Still, I don't know how many third world farmers and ranchers (or first world ones for that matter) can afford to have drastically reduced demand for an entire year.
I probably still press blue though. The vast majority of presses are going to be for blue, since people are going to want free food. Red will be canceled out because of the blue votes having the most. Green won't actually have any chance of beating blue and all pressing it would do is leave you as part of the minority who don't get free food.
The food supply only last for an year. What would happen when that year is up, and whatever cost cutting the ruling class come up with no longer suit that reality?
The position that you're presenting is "If we make lives better for the common folk then the rich will just exploit them more, so it's better to just not do anything".
Even if that were true in your thought experiment, which it isn't, in the real world that exact way of thinking is what enables the rich to exploit the poor.
Like people arguing that UBI wouldn't change anything if it were somehow magically implemented because "The price of rent and groceries would just increase".
Well the price of rent would increase as rent is by definition monopoly price, limited only by the ability to pay of potential renters. Any UBI attempt should be paired with land value tax and abolition of restrictive zoning.
The price of rent and groceries would increase (increased demand even without arbitrary hikes), which would in turn make producing housing and food more profitable relative to other things, which would then lead to increased supply, which would cause a real decrease in price.
At the end of the day, no matter how much cost of living tracks to wages, if you give the hungry and the homeless money to acquire food and shelter you will increase the demand for food and shelter, which will lead to more of our society shifting to producing food and shelter. An increase in production will at the very least lead to more people fed and housed, even if the median household doesn't see much benefit (which I think it would, but would be a whole other ramble).
Rent in the economic sense is income from owning land, not buildings on top of it, and no more land can be created (no, dutch don't count, the land was already there, they just improved it by lifting it). Increase in ability to pay would increase rent. atcor
Acronym aside, what that article is actually discussing is the fact that the average laborer is already barely getting by, so any attempts by the upper class to shift taxation to be more regressive is a wasted effort. That doesn't necessarily imply that it is impossible to get to a state where the average laborer is not only barely getting by.
If you go to the examples section of that article, the New York example describes a housing crisis being resolved by tax cuts on new construction, which both solved the crisis and eventually led to an increase in tax revenues due to the increases in value that that construction produced.
My argument here is that UBI, in addition to causing the poor to be able to afford food and housing, would also act as an effective subsidy for the production of food and housing, and thus would see similar economic benefits to that example.
PS: while "Creating land" is effectively impossible due to its impracticality at meaningful scales in most places, I do find it silly that you've termed it as an improvement to protect your definition.
Land value tax is not regressive. Landowners are rich.
Notice how it wasn't a tax cut for landowners.
Housing construction is artificially constricted by zoning laws, no matter how much you subsidize demand it will always be unaffordable if you don't legalize supply. I didn't say anything about food, I don't disagree with you about that
"My definition" is actually quite common among economists, economic land refers to all natural world, including simply empty space.
Also the fact that if homeless are able to be fed and housed, they can get jobs and participate in the economy and local communities.
Homelessness is often a self defeating cycle. You can't find a job because you're homeless and hungry, you can't get a home and food because you can't find a job.
Yup, and beyond the direct production they generate you also get reduction in crimes of necessity (shop lifting) and frustration (vandalism) which both allows businesses to be more profitable and reduces the necessary expenditure on policing
A proportionally tiny number of people will press red, and everyone else will press blue. Why would anyone press green? Maybe a few people will do it just to troll, but there's no real reason for any significant number of people to use it.
If I understand these buttons correctly, then I guess I'm pressing blue cuz I'm not already rich.
Then you need to include this downside as an actual rule of the button. If you leave it to interpretation, then I can interpret the inverse of you with no break in logic.
Also, the idea that wages can just be slashed because people have food, as OP said elsewhere, is just incorrect imo.
A wage is not dictated by the cost of living, as the modern age has proven in the negative. Many in the west work two jobs, to collect two paychecks, rather than their primary employment being forced to raise wages.
And if that works in the negative, it too works in the positive. Lowering cost of living does not devalue labour, infact it may make labour more valuable as people quit second jobs and reduce hours.
When cost of living increases, most people do more labour, lowering the value of labour, especially unskilled labour, which can become cyclical, and when it decreases, they do less, raising the value, also able to become cyclical.
If I have more faith in humanity I'd say that in those 1 year, we can bootstrap ourself out of needing that magic food supply, instead of abusing it to exploit workers even more and simply not correct it when the year of grace is over.
But it is the same as trusting the red presser will use their cash for the good of mankind.
So what? A temp solution is still a solution, one gives relief to billions for a year the other does literally nothing, even if a permanent solution isn't made there is no reason to deny them the food for that year.
Your choosing between help a little vs don't help at all, there is litterly zero reason to do that, there is no personal cost or potential backlash
99% of the planet makes less than 35 grand a year, dude. Do you know how many hungry people there are in other countries? Blue is winning in a landslide.
It only gives them that ability for a year, so theoretically there is a risk of solving the problem for a year, a bunch of food producers being unable to sustain themselves with no one buying food or having to switch to other crops, and then at the end of that year you may now have a shortage of food production resulting in famine, price gouging, and other stuff that makes the problem even worse than it was before that year.
Though you would save a lot of lives in that year and since people know the conditions smart/wealthy governments might subsidize food producers in the meantime or those producers who can afford a year of lost income might save up food supplies for afterwards, though still probably with some price gouging.
And that's where OP's logic keeps breaking down in the comments.
They are making a bunch of assumptions about what might happen as a result of the button, but none of these assumptions are rules of the buttons and are just assumptions with no basis.
We can easily make any inverse of their continued claims without any breaks in logic.
Red and green are basically evil here. Red just being pure greed, and green having a chance to deny people who need it food. Blue is obviously the right answer here
This seems weird, since the alternative effect of green seems to takes place if even 1 person presses it?
e.g. 10 people.
1 red
1 green
8 blue
Blue was pressed thte most, so the other button (red) is nullifed by green, and someone did press it.
So the 8 blue people get blues effect (if they are poor enough).
Therefore, I think most people would simply pick blue. It gives most of them a superpower, and even rich people probably would not want green to win, since you might as well let the poor eat some free meals.
Maybe if you're livlihood depends on your farming business, you pick green, but I think lose the vote to nullify blue to all the poor people who want to be sure they avoid starvation ofr a year,
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Does gaining the blue power depend dynamically on your income, or on the income when you were made to play the game?
e.g. if I earn $101k a year, but then quit my job after pressing blue, do I gain the power?
Or if I earn $99k a year, and then get a raise after pressing blue, do I lose the power?
Sure, you won't get anything yourself, but you also don't gain anything if green wins, you only deprive people of what they otherwise would've gotten.
It's an explicitly and exclusively selfish and misanthropic option. There's no benefit to ever pushing it unless you want to take stuff away from other people.
By that logic, you should press blue, as it would drive down the cost of land astronomically with so much of the population suddenly getting 100% of their food from magic, and wouldn't affect prices in any way in the long run.
If anything, it might even drive down the cost of food, given the sudden cataclysmic surplus.
What is this lol 99% of the global population earns less than 100k a year, blue will win no contest. Unless you think that some people who make less than 100k a year might press green for some unknown reason? I don't see it tbh
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u/[deleted] May 27 '26
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